Snow falls on sunny Obamacare news reports

Obamacare got its first sunny headlines in months. But they were buried in snow.

The news that the pace of enrollment in the health insurance exchanges had picked up after its lousy start earned the health law some of its most favorable coverage. The fresh numbers, a million sign-ups in January boosting the total to nearly 3.3 million, made the front pages Thursday of some of the nation’s top papers and got some positive comment on TV, too.

“Everything I’ve heard is mostly about the weather,” said Trudy Lieberman, a longtime health journalist who writes about coverage of the Affordable Care Act for the Columbia Journalism Review.

Of the country’s 15 biggest circulation newspapers, four included the enrollment story on the front pages, and four others teased it on the front. Seven didn’t include any front page mention. The Wall Street Journal, for example, relegated the enrollment story to Page 6 and put a piece about limited health plan options for Americans in poorer counties on its front page.

But distractions like the weather and the Olympics are temporary, and some media watchers say the way the story was told Thursday may show coverage of President Barack Obama’s controversial health law is turning a corner after scathing story lines about the HealthCare.gov debacle and the millions of plan cancellations. After all, it’s not every day that officials at the Department of Health and Human Services email around pictures of newspapers with positive Obamacare stories.

The tone of coverage matters to the administration trying to get its top domestic law on track. People may be more likely to sign up if they start hearing good things about the law. And that could generate more positive coverage and mute some of the distrust.

“The more positive stories about enrollment building up steam could produce somewhat more positive poll numbers,” said Drew Altman, president and CEO of the Kaiser Family Foundation. “We saw a shift to more negative numbers after the rollout. We might see those tick up a bit.”

Lieberman also detects a change in the tone.

“I think we’re seeing now kind of a shift almost back to the days [before the October rollout],” Lieberman said. “The Republicans, they’ve sort of spent their criticisms and that’s sort of dying down and now we’re back into a more cheerful presentation of the Affordable Care Act.”

That may be just a brief lull. Republicans were relatively quiet about the enrollment figures Wednesday. But just days earlier they were criticizing the White House decision to delay part of the employer mandate, and seizing on a Congressional Budget Office report that they said showed Obamacare was a job-killer.

And Hill Republicans are still working on legislation that addresses what they see as the law’s specific vulnerabilities. House Majority Leader Eric Cantor suggested in an op-ed Thursday that the chamber will vote soon on a bill changing the law’s definition of full-time workers who must be offered coverage by their employers.

“Some GOP-ers have worried that by focusing so much on enrollment problems that once the White House fixes things (as they have), the public will assume everything is peachy with health care … and they want more uncertainty, so they haven’t been overly aggressive on enrollment of late,” said NBC White House correspondent Chuck Todd.

Republicans will have plenty of uncertainty to capitalize upon, as the media struggle over the coming weeks to figure out how to even define Obamacare success, particularly since a full picture of success or failure of the new insurance markets won’t be clear for many months if not years.

“There have been huge struggles for the media with trying to figure out how to cover this,” said Kaiser’s Altman. “It’s a very complicated story for journalists to get their heads around.”

Journalists will grapple with a major question as final enrollment numbers get tallied this spring: which benchmarks matter the most. Much of the focus has been on whether 7 million people will sign up March 31. That was the CBO’s original projection, but the agency recently lowered it to 6 million. And that can be depicted as a failing because it’s not 7 million. Or it could be depicted as a success, because it’s better than people thought it could be last October.

“Like everything with Obamacare, nothing is precisely as it seems because it’s an ever-evolving story and what looks good today (3.3 million enrollees) is only good in comparison to how bad it was before,” CBS White House correspondent Major Garrett said. “Also, because the metrics of success are variable in enrollment and other aspects, the numbers story is gelatinous and will remain so at least until March 31.”

The public seems to agree that Obamacare coverage has been negative lately, according to a January survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation. Of Americans who had heard at least one story in the previous month, twice as many said they’d heard more reports about people being harmed than people being helped.

A study by the liberal-leaning Media Matters found more of the Obamacare-related stories aired in the major networks’ evening news broadcasts were negative than positive. Sixty-eight percent of ABC’s stories, 62 percent of NBC stories and 46 percent of CBS stories were “overwhelmingly negative,” according to the analysis. Just 10 percent of CBS stories and none of the other networks’ stories were “overwhelmingly positive.”